Personality and dreams: The relationship between Big Five personality traits and frequency of dream themes

The purpose of the present research was to examine the relationship between Big Five personality Traits and specific dream themes. For example, do extraverts more often dream about other people, and do more neurotic people dream more about anxious situations and negative themes. Prior research has examined the relationship between Big Five personality traits and dream themes and found correlations. One study by Bernstein and Roberts (1995) found that the Big Five were found to have a link to certain dream characteristics like dream setting or characters. For example, they found that subjects who scored higher in agreeableness reported more dream characters, while subjects who scored higher in openness reported having more unfamiliar dream characters. These studies did not examine the frequency with which specific dream themes were experienced. In the present study, I tested the hypothesis that Big Five personality traits will be related to the frequency that specific dream themes occur. In the online study, 150 participants answered questions about demographics, personality traits, attitudes, beliefs about dreaming, dream recall and frequency, and dream content. The results showed that there are significant correlations between the Big Five factors and dream themes. For example, higher levels of neuroticism were found to be correlated with themes like losing something valuable, insects or spiders, being dressed inappropriately, snakes, and being chased or pursued